Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

By Peter Zeihan

Should we stop caring about fading regional powers like China, Russia, Germany, and Iran? Will the collapse of international cooperation push France, Turkey, Japan, and Saudi Arabia to the top of international concerns?

Most countries and companies are not prepared for the world Peter Zeihan says we’re already living in. For decades, America’s allies have depended on its might for their economic and physical security. But as a new age of American isolationism dawns, the results will surprise everyone. In Disunited Nations, geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan presents a series of counterintuitive arguments about the future of a world where trade agreements are coming apart and international institutions are losing their power. 

Germany will decline as the most powerful country in Europe, with France taking its place. Every country should prepare for the collapse of China, not North Korea. We are already seeing, as Zeihan predicts, a shift in outlook on the Middle East: It is no longer Iran that is the region’s most dangerous threat, but Saudi Arabia. The world has gotten so accustomed to the “normal” of an American-dominated order that we have all forgotten the historical norm: several smaller, competing powers and economic systems throughout Europe and Asia. 

America isn’t the only nation stepping back from the international system. From Brazil to Great Britain to Russia, leaders are deciding that even if plenty of countries lose in the growing disunited chaos, their nations will benefit. The world isn’t falling apart—it’s being pushed apart. The countries and businesses prepared for this new every-country-for-itself ethic are those that will prevail; those shackled to the status quo will find themselves lost in the new world disorder.

Smart, interesting, and essential reading, Disunited Nations is a sure-to-be-controversial guidebook that analyzes the emerging shifts and resulting problems that will arise in the next two decades. We are entering a period of chaos, and no political or corporate leader can ignore Zeihan’s insights or his message if they want to survive and thrive in this uncertain new time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Mar 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9780062913692

Peter Zeihan

Peter Zeihan is a geopolitical strategist and the founder of the consulting firm Zeihan on Geopolitics. His clients include energy corporations, financial institutions, business associations, agricultural interests, universities, and the U.S. military. He is the author of The Accidental Superpower and The Absent Superpower. He lives in Colorado.

Book preview

Introduction: Moments of Transition

At the end of the last millennium I found myself in a moment of transition.

Just after Christmas 1999, I drop-kicked my relationship, my job, and my life in the nation’s capital, loaded up everything I owned into a rickety SUV, and took off for a fresh start in Austin, Texas. On January 10, 2000, I was a shiny new staffer at a place called Stratfor.com, at the time a media- and geopolitics-analysis house. My new boss was . . . a piece of work. Matt Baker was a wiry ball of over-caffeinated angst and passion, stuffed into a sharp-edged personality that oozed detailed knowledges (not opinions, knowledges) as regards Europe and Russia and China and Turkey and so on.

As my recent work in DC had involved quite a bit of Europe and Russia and China and Turkey, clearly I had things to contribute. Matt and I clashed openly, vitriolically, and often. In doing so we developed a deep mutual respect and became good friends.

One night over too many adult beverages we discussed moments of transition of the less personal, and more global, type.

Matt’s core thesis was that the entire fabric of the international system was based on the American alliance network, which in turn depended upon a nearly feudal mix of American security commitments and deference to American desires. We back you up in your backyard where it matters to you, and in exchange, you back us up where it matters to us. Challenges from the allies had started to pop up after the Berlin Wall fell, triply so as many of the allies sensed the end of history with the 1990s Russian collapse, and disdained the screwiness of American foreign policy in places like Kosovo and Iraq. Matt’s contention was that as the fear of nuclear Armageddon faded from memory into history, the Americans would have a harder time holding the allies together. In his mind 2020 would look a lot like 2003 with countries resisting American power, but the Americans would continue to muster suitable motivation to (successfully) pressure everyone into maintaining some version of the status quo.

In other words, everyone would keep working with America, because the most powerful country in history would want to keep it that way. It wasn’t going to be quite as chaotic as herding cats, but it would be close.

In contrast, I felt that the alliance network, bereft of the security demands of the Cold War, had slid into a new role. Instead of defending the allies on the plains of Northern Europe or in the seas of East Asia, it instead was spreading security to the global commons. This was becoming an end unto itself that was superseding the old logic of alliance. The root of economic growth is physical security, and if the Cold War ended and the alliance could hold, the nearly automatic result would be a transformational boom global in scope that was both economic and technological. In my mind, 2020 would look a lot like 1950, albeit without the whole fear-of-nuclear-war thing. The spreading wealth, by force of information and capital flow, would grind down what less modern, less democratic pockets of resistance remained.

In other words, the world order would keep going, because unraveling it could mean unwinding decades of economic penetration and deny billions access to hamburgers and cell phones. Who would want that? It wasn’t quite going to be Star Trek, but it would be close.

I was Stratfor’s unofficial economist. Matt was the gun guy. Most of our friction came from arguing over the power of the checkbook versus the power of Smith & Wesson. Yet so did our greatest collaborations.

After a bunch of backing and forthing and what-ifing and puzzling over oddly colored mixers, Matt asked point-blank, So what happens to my ‘suitable motivation’ and your ‘transformational boom’ when the Americans change their minds about their alliance? No alliance system can last without a common threat. As the night’s seventh drink soaked in, we both hmmmed as we contemplated the dark, horrifying possibility that we might both be wrong. I’m pretty sure we cracked the code a few minutes later, but our mutual blackouts robbed us of the pertinent knowledge. Instead, as often was the case with Matt, I was left with more questions than answers.

Ever since, both at Stratfor and beyond, my professional life has been about building up enough understandings to close out that long-ago conversation. Disunited Nations, nearly twenty years in the making, is my best shot.

Disunited Nations is about what happens when major powers decide they are better off competing instead of cooperating. It is a book about what happens when the global Order isn’t just falling apart but when many leaders feel their country will be better off tearing it down. We’re going to look at the rise of Trump and leaders like him. We’re going to think through Saudi Arabia and Iran’s competition to rule (or misrule) the Middle East. We’re going to look at how we match farmers to hungry mouths, minerals to manufacturing, oil to gas tanks.

Through these stories, we’re going to keep two big ideas in mind.

The first is that geography might not be destiny, but it is damn close. It is the biggest factor in determining how we act and how we live and fundamentally who we are. Live in a desert and bam! you’re going to fight to protect what little you have. Live on a coast and bam! you’re going to eat a lot of foreign food. Live in a dense urban area and bam! you’re probably not going to have an issue with Tongans, Thais, Tunisians, or transvestites. Live in the mountains and bam! you’re going to be a bit . . . persnickety when folks from other regions roll through. As we were geographers at heart, in this Matt and I were in complete agreement.

Most of us consistently misread economies and conflicts because we don’t take geography into account. It’s so clear that we are not like the next town over, and city folk are not like country folk, but when we start trying to explain the world, geography often slips our mind. We misinterpret what’s happening in the news, and think China is holding on to Hong Kong out of stubbornness or the fights about the American-Mexican border are only about race. Geography shapes everything. Including us. What’s been different in recent decades is that geography has been suspended somewhat, enabling deep global economic interconnections. We’ve come to see those connections as a great strength; they are turning into weakness before our very eyes.

The second big idea is that Disunited Nations is being published now in 2020, not a few years from now, because the world has run out of time. That moment of transition when the Order will come crashing down is almost upon us.

It may not seem this way to Americans who have been engaged in some degree of warfare continuously since 1999 and had decades of duck-and-cover drills before that, but the world since 1946 is as calm as the world has ever been. In creating their anti-Soviet Cold War alliance, the Americans by hook, crook, carrot, and stick brought every significant power of the past five centuries together under a single banner: Norway, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Japan, China—all of them and more allied in various degrees of formality against the Soviet Union. If they were to be fighting the Soviets, it wouldn’t be particularly productive if they were also fighting one another. The American alliance didn’t so much end history as freeze it in place.

Most Americans are broadly familiar with the European side of the equation—after centuries of conflict within the Continent the guns fell nearly silent, courtesy of the American security system—but the impact on Asia was even bigger. China and India did not have a single century in the past two millennia when they were not at war within themselves or under assault from a foreign power. Instead, from the American-enforced end of British colonial rule in India in the late 1940s and China’s joining of the American-led alliance against the Soviets in the 1970s, the two have had the most security and wealth in their long histories.

As the decades rolled on, the Soviets ran out of gas. The American network expanded deep into the nonaligned countries of the developing world and the former Soviet Empire. But the Americans never adapted their overall strategies to a post–Cold War world, and so never built a case at home or abroad for their alliance in a world without the Soviet Union. It turns out—both to the detriment of Matt’s and my own pet theories—the 1990s and 2000s were less a moment of transition and more a world on autopilot, with an old security strategy enabling some gangbusters growth. That gangbusters growth is what most of us think of as normal. It is not. It is nothing more than a moment in time made possible by some strategic inertia.

But now Matt’s suitable motivation is over. The Americans have changed their mind about their alliance and have turned sharply more insular. There is no effort to ride herd. The W Bush administration abused the allies, the Obama administration ignored the allies, and the Trump administration insulted the allies. And so America’s list of allies has shrunk from nearly everyone to the potentially useful to the obviously useful to the obviously loyal to those with little choice. In a world without America, the questions become: Who will still benefit from some lingering connection to the Americans? And who can go it alone?

My transformational boom is over as well. Without the global security the Americans guaranteed, global trade and global energy flows cannot continue. Seven decades’ worth of global industrialization and modernization are not simply at risk, the very pillars of civilization are cracking. In a world without stability, the questions become: Who was most dependent upon the world that was and so will fall? And who was most restrained by the old Order and so will soar?

The world we know is collapsing. Entire countries are watching in horror as what makes them possible—global access, imported energy, foreign markets, American troops—slips through their fingers. For many, there just isn’t enough access or energy or markets or security for them to maintain what they have, much less grow. In a world of want, the questions become: What do countries need to survive in a scrambled world? Who will shoot to get what they need? And who gets shot at?

Not all competitions and scarcities are created equal. Nearly all food is dependent upon global trade, whether in the form of imported inputs or the foodstuffs themselves. For decades, the world’s experiences with famine have been crises of distribution, the inability to match foods with mouths. Global breakdown guts food supply itself. The security concerns of the past two decades were largely limited to terrorism, but the tools necessary to counter terror are radically different from those needed to protect agricultural supply chains. Fewer door-to-door manhunts, more beyond-the-horizon naval patrols. In a world of different scarcities and different tools, the questions become: Where will trade patterns hold and where will they collapse? Which ones are worth fighting over? Which tools will be brought to bear? Are we on the verge of a mess of overlapping and interlocking naval competitions for something as basic as the right to eat?

Both Matt and I were wrong, and for the same reasons. We both suffered from a failure of imagination, believing in our respective, simplistic visions that the world of tomorrow would be some variation of the world we knew. The break is sharper. We stand at the end of the era that began with the Cold War. It’ll be less like the messiness of the early 2000s or the raw potential of the 1950s, and more a disastrous combination of the battle royales and displacements of the 1870s against the economic backdrop of the 1930s. It. Will. Suck. A mad scramble for the scraps of the era just ending. Compared with the safety and wealth of the past several decades, it may seem like the literal end of the world. But the end of an era isn’t the same as the end of history. Something new is coming. Something that, historically speaking, is far more normal than anything the Americans created. Just keep in mind that normal is far from synonymous with comfortable, much less favorable.

Disunited Nations is my effort to sketch out that normal future. To answer these questions and more. To identify the countries that will rise to dominate the human condition, and perhaps provide a glimpse as to what that condition will be, both in the time during and after this moment of transition. In the pages that follow, I’m going to argue that thinking the future will look more like the year 2000 than the year 1900 has negative effects in almost every sphere of our lives. On a grand scale, many of us are betting on the wrong horses. France will lead the new Europe, not Germany. We should be worried about Saudi Arabia, not Iran. We should be thinking about how to remedy mass starvation in China, not counter its economic and military clout. As we look at how each country has benefited from the Order, and what each brings to the table in a new world, these conclusions will seem obvious, rather than controversial.

In Chapters 1 through 4, we’ll take a whirlwind tour of the past and present: the various epochs of history, combined with a quick and dirty review of how to run a global empire and what makes countries tick. Chapters 5 through 13 are dedicated to the major powers—both those we all know are the countries of the future (but in reality won’t be able to hack it), as well as those we barely think about that will rise to rule their respective roosts.

Capping off each country-themed chapter is a bit of a report card. A cheat sheet, if you will. A few distilled lines of information on each country’s guts and outlook to help readers filter the news and paranoia and fluff of the day to generate a more accurate appreciation for the country’s potential and limitations. For those of you who like to share books with people who don’t like to read, I’ve taken the liberty of refining the chapter’s thoughts into a single, solitary word.

Finally, we’ll end with a pair of chapters on the United States. The Americans might not be running things any longer, but it isn’t like they’re disappearing into a black hole. The United States will retain—by far—more power than any player, past or present. So it’s important to understand both domestic limitations on Americans’ capacity as well as the sorts of issues and allies they will still care about. In all cases, you can grab full, sharable versions of each and every graphic in this book at my website, www.Zeihan.com.

I knew Matt for only three years. In 2003 he was suddenly, horribly taken from us. I miss his passion. His brutal honesty. He would have hated the first draft of this book. He would have ripped it apart. I would have been so pissed at him. Then, we would have rebuilt it. Together. It would have been awesome!

This version is still pretty good.

Chapter 1

The Road So Far

There’s no good way to launch into a book on the past and future without using a quote from The Lord of the Rings. Probably from an immortal elf matriarch. Something about how the world is changed. Since that’s all heavily copyrighted, we’re going to have to just jump right in.

Time erodes everything. Countries included. Surviving history requires a delicate balance of factors that most of the world lacks: border zones that are difficult to cross and an interior zone where it is easy to move people and goods and ideas around. Such a mix of crunchy and gooey is rare. Most locations are either so crunchy throughout that the locals don’t get along, or so gooey on the edges that the neighbors’ armies like to host block parties on your lawn. Historically speaking, most countries have been small, brittle, fragile, and, above all, short-lived. If countries cannot arise or thrive or survive, history tends to stand still.

But that is not true everywhere. There’s a handful of countries whose geography is in balance. These countries defy time, and so have dominated much of human history. Let’s start at the beginning.

THE FIRST AGE: EMPIRE

It all comes down to a pair of concepts we all instinctually grasp but spend little time pondering.

The first is continuity: the idea that the positive things that make your life today possible—health, shelter, clean water, food, education, clothing, a functioning government, and so on—will still be around tomorrow. No brigands will steal your cow; no dryad will kidnap your children; no horde will descend from the distant horizon and burn down your local Walmart. The modern equivalent? Flip a switch and the lights turn on. Each and every time. Historically speaking, continuity is a rare, precious thing. Few countries boast the sort of crusty borders that enable them to be protected from outside threats for more than a few decades at a time. For most, going a few years is about all they can hope for.

Not all threats to continuity are from bullets or sharp sticks. Drought and flood can wreck a system just as easily. Or a rampaging, homegrown mob. Or a coup. Or particularly crappy leadership. And never underestimate the power of a good plague. Breaks in continuity shatter institutions, disrupt food production, wreck infrastructure, break educational coherence, and severely damage cultures. Recovery is, of course, possible, but in many ways every time a country suffers an invasion or civil war or coup or famine, it must start over.

The second concept, economies of scale, is even more straightforward. Imagine you’ve been tasked to build a computer. All the necessary information and equipment has been provided for you to melt and purify sand into silicon and draw it into crystals and slice them into wafers and score them with acid and lay them with metal and assemble them into circuit boards and so on. How long would it take you to do it? How long would it take you to learn all the steps independently? A lifetime? Ten? And then, at the end of it all, you’d have one measly computer.*

Economies of scale are ultimately about specialization. Instead of you learning and carrying out every individual task, you need to learn only one—say, scoring the silicon wafer with acid. Other people take charge of all the other tasks, one each. Different people are better at different things, and matching people with their niche makes the entire system more productive and efficient. After your first month on the job, you’ve etched several thousand wafers, and you’ve gotten pretty good at it, both in terms of speed and quality. Most everyone else is having a similar experience. Collectively, the team is cranking out dozens of computers an hour. The system is scaled up. Production becomes cheaper. End-sales prices go down. And to sweeten the deal, your deep knowledge of that one facet lets you innovate at a faster pace, too.

National success requires achieving both continuity and economies of scale. Those big enough to have economies of scale rarely have good borders that enable continuity—think Russia. Those sufficiently isolated to have long continuities rarely have scale—think New Zealand.

This is not the case in every place in every time. Some locations can make it work. Some countries have the geographic viability required to make a go of things. The best of these locations do more than succeed as countries. They can reach out and absorb other, less-than-ideal lands. In doing so, they don’t just become bigger; they swallow up resources, knowledge bases, and taxes, and they make them their own, creating even larger economies of scale. They anchor their important lands on more secure footings.

They become empires. Most of human history is the story of how this or that imperial center didn’t simply come to be, but expanded to dominate our understanding of humanity itself.

Any number of things can wound an empire: climatic shifts that gut food production can crash even the most powerful of entities terrifyingly fast; internal political disputes can (literally) behead the system at the top; outlying territories can rebel, costing the imperial center an economic lifeline or a strategic bulwark. But by far the most common way an empire perishes is by way of another empire waltzing over and punching it in the face.

It added up to make the Imperial Age a brutal era. Anyone who was not from an imperial core didn’t have the best life, typically being used as cannon fodder in incessant wars among clashing empires. And it all lasted a loooooooooooooooooooooong time. The world’s first city—Uruk, in Mesopotamia, home to Gilgamesh—upgraded from a small settlement to something more permanent sometime in the middle of the fourth millennium BC. The world’s first empire—Akkadia—erupted upon its neighbors a mere thousand years later.*

For over four thousand years, empire was the norm.

How empires interacted had a lot to do with the horse they rode in on. For a long time, quite literally. If we view history as a series of inventions, the history of empires looks like a long arc of new efficiencies in movement . . . and in death. From the Mongolian use of stirrups to move at blazing speeds across the steppe to the newfangled Portuguese ships that crossed oceans, technology brought the world’s empires into ever-greater proximity with ever-bigger consequences.

Until technology became so efficient that wars between empires tore the world to shreds. The two technological families of deepwater navigation and industrialization enabled all the empires to engage one another everywhere at the same time. The resulting ultimate, inevitable, catastrophic, system-ending conflict was the most deadly, destructive war in history.

We know it more commonly as the Second World War. It set the stage for something fundamentally new.

THE SECOND AGE: ORDER

World War II didn’t so much end the Imperial Age as eradicate it. When the dust settled, only two powers remained—the United States and the Soviet Union—and they immediately got themselves uncomfortable for a long, drawn-out struggle. The Soviet system was the final remaining empire, and it operated like all the empires before it. A single group of people—the Russians—called most of the shots, and everyone else, whether they be Estonian or Polish or Slovak or Bulgarian or Armenian or Uzbek or Tatar or Ingush, was there to provide strategic depth, captive markets, and, if need be, a deep pile of bodies to throw at the neighbors. Anyone who had a problem with that could suck on some bullets in a work camp. Very old school.

In a way the power that rivaled the Soviet Union—the United States—was kind of, sort of, an empire as well. The Americans had expanded from a small coastal base to dominate the middle third—the best third—of the North American continent. But a mix of factors made them something else entirely.

First, the Americans started life as the extension of an empire. The common struggle of the original thirteen colonies against the British system granted them the most important aspect of a common identity: a common cause. Almost by definition, empires lack that—the imperial center tends to suck the life out of colonies and protectorates.

Second, because the Americans began as a branch of the world’s most powerful military system, at independence they enjoyed a massive military advantage over most of their immediate neighbors. Combine that advantage with their resistance to Old World diseases, and the natives of North America were all but extinguished, leaving ample room for the new Americans to expand into. Historical revisionists have reevaluated and are reevaluating* the United States’ role in the destruction of the native cultures, but the fact remains that Old World peoples cannot even fathom how extraordinarily low the barriers were to the Americans’ territorial and economic expansion. The natives’ annihilation was so complete the United States faces little of the internal heartburn of undigested peoples of imperial systems.

Third, that expansion—both in population and geographic terms—muddled the differences among the coastal states of the early nation. Thirteen distinct identities merged in the interior into something new and more holistic. Within a generation of the end of the War of Independence, the Americans thought of themselves less as citizens of the various states and more as citizens of one of two regions: the North and the South.

Fourth, these two regions duked it out in what remains the deadliest conflict in American history in both relative and absolute terms. At war’s end, the North was victorious, but rather than purge or subjugate the defeated South, the Northerners reintegrated their defeated brothers into the Union while simultaneously beginning the long, multifaceted process of incorporating nonwhites into the greater whole. This Reconstruction was awkward and incomplete and absorbed the bulk of the split country’s attention for three decades, but despite its at-best half-victories on racial inclusion it succeeded in both maintaining and expanding America’s continuity while simultaneously deepening its economies of scale. By 1900 the United States boasted more arable land, better borders, a better integrated population than any other single self-ruling power, and a larger population than any such power save the decidedly unegalitarian czarist Russia.

Finally, the Reconstruction success deepened America’s cultural integration process, blurring the differences between North and South. To give an idea of just how successful this has become in contemporary times, citizens of the American states of West Virginia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania—states on opposite sides of the Civil War who suffered the most brutal fighting of that conflict—are now most likely to list their ethnic background as American.

Such melding is critical. The United States is not an empire. There is no clear political or economic core. New York, California, Texas, and Florida all have very strong ideas about just who is actually in charge. There is no singular region that enjoys preferential treatment. American politics might often be divisive, bitter, loud, rude, annoying, childish, venomous, inane, flabbergasting, willfully ignorant, and unfathomably obtuse, but it is pretty clear it is not any Americans’ destiny to serve as cannon fodder. Combine that shared identity with fantastically crunchy borders and a truly wonderful gooey center, and post-Reconstruction America isn’t simply a fundamentally different sort of political beast; it is the most powerful country on Earth.

But most powerful does not mean all-powerful. When the Americans emerged from Reconstruction, they discovered a world in the midst of a significant military-technological upgrade that brought the empires into even greater proximity. New ships could cross oceans in weeks instead of months. New artillery could reach miles. Aircraft would soon debut. America’s strategic isolation was being intruded upon. Ultimately, reluctantly, the Americans felt compelled to join in the world wars, the apex of industrialized slaughter.

And they really didn’t care for what came next. One tender-hearted Joseph Stalin had taken the disaster of a country he’d inherited from Vladimir Lenin’s failed economic experiments and used the white-hot fires of brutality and battle to forge a war machine of unparalleled size and power. With an inhuman lust for casualties normally reserved for AI-driven killer robots in post-apocalyptic horror novels, Stalin fueled that machine with millions of Soviet soldiers, and then wielded it with sufficient skill and fury to beat back the Nazis inch by bloody inch. GIs had good reason to freak out a bit, as they were now facing off against a battle-hardened Soviet force that was literally raping its way through eastern Germany and the German capital.

The field of combat did not appeal; the Northern European Plain is flat and open. The German war machine had charged west and east across it with frightening speed—a speed the Soviets may not have been able to match in their westward assault, but that they more than made up for in sheer horror. It crossed the mind of more than one American military commander that the Americans had found themselves facing the same quandary of the Germans and French and Dutch and Poles and Russians before them: how the hell do you establish a defensive position on the vast wide opens of Northern Europe?

The potential ally list wasn’t encouraging either. The Europeans—former imperial centers all—had a historyful of antagonisms and backstabbing stretching back to their misty beginnings. How could the US take a ragtag group of war-broken countries with an epic poem of mutual grievances and get them to work together against a threat as monolithically terrifying as the Red Army?

In Asia it was even messier. At war’s end the Americans were not simply occupying Japan in totality; rather, the way the Americans had fought the war had created the greatest power vacuum in Asian history.

The American campaign didn’t eject the Japanese from every inch of the territory the Japanese had captured. Instead the Yanks hopped from island to island, only seizing sufficient bases to maintain their advance. This continued until the Americans could angle themselves into a position where they could concentrate their bombs—industrial in volume, reach, and devastation capacity—upon the Home Islands. Well over 90 percent of the territory the Japanese captured in the war the Americans didn’t touch—including all the Japanese territory in China and Korea (where the Japanese were winning right up to the day the nukes fell). Overnight, the East Asian rim went from a near-singular imperial government to the complete surrender and withdrawal of that government’s authority and its troops. Chaos reigned.

In the course of less than six months, the Americans went from having the world’s simplest geography in terms of security and wealth, to occupying—and needing to protect—its most complex.

This didn’t mean there weren’t perks.

At war’s end, the United States floated what was indisputably the most powerful navy in history, while simultaneously the assets of nearly all other historical naval powers—the Japanese, Russian, French, German, Dutch, and Italian—were busy serving as the foundation for new reefs. The single exception of significance, the British Navy, was reduced to acting as an American adjunct. That enabled the Americans to think forward to what pieces of their newly expanded geography of responsibility could be excellent naval bases.

But for every new redoubt, there was a quagmire-in-waiting. For every Great Britain, there was a Fulda Gap. For every Singapore, there was a DMZ. For every Okinawa, a Saigon. For every Diego Garcia, a Beirut. Defending such locations under any circumstances is difficult, but defending them all? At the same time? For the Americans, these weren’t simply territories with which they had little to no familiarity; they were on different continents, necessitating supply lines the likes of which no strategic planner had ever considered viable. Right from the beginning, it was obvious there was no possible way the Americans could shoulder the burden themselves.

The Americans needed allies to help, but far-flung allies meant far-flung commitments—every potential ally brought in a new geography with new complications. The Americans needed a worldful of allies if they were to contain and beat back a power as large, determined, battle-hardened, and ethically unfettered as the Soviets. They needed those allies to be fully motivated, committed to the fight.

In that charming way the Americans have of oversimplifying things, the Americans cut the Gordian knot. Carpe-ing the hell out of the diem, the American president—one Franklin Delano Roosevelt—invited everyone to a ski resort in the New England town of Bretton Woods and bribed everyone into joining him in forging a new world.

The Americans pledged total physical security for anyone who joined their alliance, protecting them with tanks, troops, ships, and the still-under-development nuclear umbrella. The Americans used their absolute mastery of the seas to protect any ship from anywhere transporting any product to any location. And that was just the beginning:

Face pirates? No problem. The American Navy would take them out. No more imperial raiding of other countries’ commerce.

Soviets trying to overthrow your government? No problem. The American Congress would vote you some more reconstruction funds. The Marshall Plan surged forth.

Can’t get the lights on? No problem. The Americans would ensure you could import coal and oil from anywhere in the world. The Americans would patrol—in force—the Persian Gulf.

Can’t jump-start your economy? No problem. The American market—the only market of size to survive the war—was now open to your exports. America’s trade deficit was born.

Don’t trust the American security guarantee? No problem. The Americans would join battle with the Soviets—even at the times and places of the Soviets’ choosing—to prove their reliability. Enter the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

If you side with the Americans against the Soviets, the Americans will use their military might to protect you, their economic might to subsidize your existence, and for free provide you with everything every empire throughout history had ever fought for. For the former empires, it meant more than having access to sea lanes and markets and resources; it meant having access to all sea lanes and all markets and all resources all the time as if they had decisively won a global war. For secondary powers, it was like having access to the potential of the British Empire at its peak, without the commensurate military outlays. For the colonies, it meant independence from their old masters and access to the same global market as the former empires, as well as the opportunity to chart their own political and economic continuities. It no longer mattered if your lands couldn’t possibly sustain a growing population or if you had a wide-open border. For the first time in history, geography was put on hold. Major empire, lagging power, or colony, join the Americans’ new alliance against the Soviets, and you were secure, not just from the new Soviet threat, but from the old threats as well.

What we think of as free trade is much more than just the regular exchange of goods and services. It is much more than getting the latest doodad via Amazon Prime. It is much more than globalism. It is a global management system. A global network. A global alliance. A global order.

The first global Order.

It worked . . . amazingly well! The Order provided the economic grounding for the entire American grand strategy throughout the Cold War. Without the Order, there would have been no NATO. With the Order, the defeated Axis powers were transformed from implacable foes to pliable allies. The empires that had so vexed American strategic policy during its first fifteen decades of existence—including that of the Americans’ own former colonial master—were lashed to the American will. The Americans had their global alliance.

Turns out, the creation of history’s largest and most powerful alliance was just the beginning.

The Americans were in many ways champions of stability. By enforcing America’s own brand of global peace with some Tiffany-size karats and Teddy Roosevelt–size sticks, the Americans banished from memory the old imperial boxing matches that tended to leave no room for weaker states. Instead of the vicious circle of imperial clashes, the Order created a virtuous circle of political stability, security, and economic development. This helped push the technological descendants of the Industrial Revolution even further, while keeping most governments busy with the needs of their people. Famine and disease weren’t exactly banished, but they certainly lost their grip on day-to-day life. The result has been the deepest educational penetration, infrastructure expansion, economic growth, and technological advancement in history.

One of the Order’s most impressive features was its universality. The United States guaranteed the safety of the imports, exports, and supply lines of everyone. Even countries it economically competes with. Even countries it likes to bomb. As Detroit was hollowing out, German automotive exports were sacrosanct. As Midwest farmers were struggling with low grain prices, those pursuing Brazilian agricultural expansion found it easy to import American fertilizers and equipment. As the Americans were sparring diplomatically and militarily with the Iranian Ayatollah, the American Navy maintained ironclad naval safety for all commercial vessels at all times. Even when the Americans were actively prosecuting a war—as in Vietnam—they persisted in protecting local commerce, even that of the other side.*

The Soviet Union found itself often on the defensive, forced to act as the agent of chaos, seeking to overthrow states that were economically thriving, many for the first time ever. It was a losing proposition. Yet by any measure of the old Imperial Age, the Russians were doing fabulously well. The nuclear doctrine of mutually assured destruction combined with the Americans being in a different hemisphere all but guaranteed that the Soviets would not face the sorts of land invasions that had so wrecked their continuity every few decades. The result was a degree of development and peace throughout their lands that the Russian people had never known.* Continuity and economies of scale reached all-time highs, and they took the Russians further and higher than they had ever been.

Yet the Soviet rise was nothing compared with what the Americans mustered with their Order. Almost all the world’s richest lands united into a single, integrated economic system guaranteed by the American Navy and nuclear arsenal. The Soviets never had a chance, and five short decades later, their system—besieged, outnumbered, outmaneuvered, and outspent—collapsed.

The Order may be the world that most of us know as familiar, but from the long view of history, the Order is one of the most bizarre periods ever.

It is nothing compared with what came next.

THE THIRD AGE: ORDER WITHOUT BORDERS

The Soviets saw the writing on the wall, and in the mid-1980s they started negotiations toward a managed defeat. What was intended to be the first step turned out to be the first, last, and only. Soviet forces relaxed their control of their Central European satellite states in early 1989. By 1992, the Cold War and the Soviet Union were in the ash heap.

The Cold War victors had a bit of a party, and then something curious occurred.

The American policy of global Order was a strategic one, designed as

Reviews for Disunited Nations

[davidwineberg · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Disunited Nations is a remarkable attempt summarize every major nation’s future, determined by its location, geography, its past and present. Peter Zeihan of Strafor has laid it all out in a straightforward and shocking manner. It is scathing, brutal, honest, and to at least some extent, correct.Underlying everything in Disunited Nations is the Order. The Order is what the United States imposed following World War II. It was meant to ally everyone against the Soviets, but it imposes peaceful transport by sea and air all over the world. The US could do this because it represented half the production of the world at that point, when most of the industrialized nations were in ruins. It did it without knowing or understanding the side effects it would produce. It allowed Europe to unite for the first time – without war. It allowed Japan to look outward for the first time peacefully, and become a world power without bloodshed. Most importantly, it allowed goods to be traded, which multiplied economies and standards of living worldwide, taking billions out of poverty and making the comfortable unprecedentedly wealthy. It even allowed rogue nations to build themselves up through world trade. No more, Zeihan says.The United States is tiring of maintaining the Order. It is pulling back from being the world’s policeman. It’s navy, down by about 40%, is no longer capable of maintaining open oceans globally. NATO is brain-dead, according President Macron. The USA itself doesn’t really need the rest of the world, having everything it (thinks it) needs at home. As the Order dissipates, what will replace it? Zeihan thinks he knows. But even if he doesn’t, it is tremendous food for thought.First, there is a terrific exploration of all the contradictions and hypocrisy in America’s foreign policy. The messages it sends confuse not only the rest of the world, but its own citizens, businesspeople and corporations. Without detailing all Zeihan’s endless (valid) examples, let me just point out that Mort Sahl said “Anyone who holds a consistent foreign policy stance in this country must eventually be tried for treason,” in 1964. It has only gotten far worse.Zeihan has a breezy style, with all kinds of snide remarks and asides to brighten a grim future. In writing about an alternative to the US dollar as the global reserve currency, he says: “If there’s one thing the whole world agrees on, it is that the British should never be in charge of anything ever again.” On the importance of food security: “Anyone sufficiently arrogant to think the poor will simply starve in silence has a particularly weak grasp of not only biology, but history.” And he loves to break up a miserable description with the line: ”It is worse than it sounds.” And then expand on the true ugliness of it. He also likes to turn maps on their sides, giving a totally different perspective to positioning, neighbors, and access. Not everything is straight up and down.The closest thing to a common denominator in what will take nations down is their demographics. Too few younger people supporting too many older ones. The extreme is China where they did it on purpose, but Japan, Germany and the USA are already suffering its consequences today. For many countries, it will be fatal, he thinks.Zeihan believes China is not only going nowhere, it will break up, and sooner than later. “The country has less farmland per person than Saudi Arabia,” he says in one of his many clear and shocking examples. Its energy demand is off the charts. So is its financial health, but in the other direction. Its navy is not capable of straying from its shore, let alone protecting sea lanes outside India, Indonesia and Vietnam, among others it has annoyed with its arrogance and demands. Looking at China’s history, he says it will simply revert to the mean. And that’s not pretty. As he puts it: “China will suffer a cataclysmic flameout every bit as impressive as its rise to power.” Saudi Arabia is a much bigger threat than China. It doesn’t care who it offends, and seeks to create chaos all around itself to keep itself secure. Chaos in Syria, Iraq and Yemen are examples where the Saudis want nothing to do with peace breaking out. They are also trying it in Qatar and of course Iran. As a medieval monarchy, it is totally paranoid. It won’t even let citizens be in its military, hiring mercenaries instead. And lest anyone forget, it loves sending terrorists out to say, take down the World Trade Center.It is around this time you begin to wonder how right Zeihan is. Saudi Arabia is projected to consume as much energy in air conditioning as it sells in oil by 2030. This will cripple its economy, which is already phony. The country relies almost entirely on near slavery for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis to keep its infrastructure going. No one with a future stays there. Its human rights record is atrocious, and the only allies it has aren’t even in the middle east. They’re petroleum customers. Is it really going to thrive going forward?Zeihan sees Russia ending as badly and as soon as China. Too many fronts, too long a border, and too little internal investment augur very badly if the (dis)Order makes trade difficult.He thinks Argentina is beautifully placed and endowed to dominate South America as Brazil implodes due to complications in its geography and endemic corruption. But Argentina is a basket case facing bankruptcy once again. In the new disOrder, how will it rise, thrive and take over?He thinks Germany is toast – right now. It has doomed itself, while France is on the rise, on the way to becoming the sole and dominant power in Europe. It has the biggest and best armed forces, natural endowments to keep food supplies secure, and can team up with the USA better than anyone in the world. But will the EU survive France?Canada, on the other hand, is now irrelevant to the US, and is being set adrift. It has been replaced by Mexico as the America’s biggest trading partner, and is no longer key to a missile defense system the US doesn’t believe it will ever need. He says the US spent a century leaning on Canada for intelligence and support against their common allies and enemies. Now the US doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, so Canada’s assistance is of no value.Turkey will rise as a regional power, taking over the Black Sea area and at least all of Cyprus and maybe Lebanon, as Russia retreats in advance of its total collapse. In the new disOrder, Turkey will escort all shipping (for a huge fee) as it transits from the Mediterranean, something it cannot do in the Order.But despite all the truly fascinating research and analysis, the predictions of his models miss the biggest threat to everyone – climate change. It is not until page 329 (in reference to models of the Sahara) that he makes its one mention. Incredibly to me, he doesn’t take into account the inevitable wars and mass migration as whole nations go under water. He doesn’t account for Canada’s unbeatable stocks of fresh clean water that a parched desert in the USA will be desperate for when the Ogallala Reservoir is totally drained. France is already suffering double digit declines in food production from drought and severe weather. Nor does Zeihan account for the diversion of trillions of dollars as every nation tries to fend off the effects of climate change, if only in disaster relief following ever more severe weather events. Instead, he posits the importance of Caribbean islands to the US in its much-reduced sphere of influence to protect itself without consideration for the rest of the world. But will those island nations even be there? This is a huge and fatal omission in all his modeling.And yet. What it all means is that even if Trump is removed or replaced, the world will not revert to a saved restore point. Things will continue to deteriorate, as per the second law of thermodynamics, and the claims Zeihan makes are what they will revolve about. It’s complicated, and Disunited Nations presents it in an accessible and compelling, if incomplete survey.David Wineberg

[Michael Koch · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A most interesting and uncomfortable assessment on the harsh realities and fortunes of geo-politics. Peter Zeihan does not hesitate to describe in broad and brash swathes the geo-political iterations going forward. If you live in the bounteous land of "Merica" life will carry on as before, or perhaps even better. Local politics will resume an indulgent food fight on Thanksgiving day. Obese, wealthy and partisan zealots armed with a larder of blue or red sponge-cake, cavorting and competing for the latest brand of righteous victory. Watching from the outside, strangers or perhaps distant relatives, desperately begging for scraps as they are embraced by the cold and icy winds of a new reality.

[daniel5estes · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

That this book was published just a week or so before America's COVID shutdown in March 2020 is fascinating for its context. Peter's line of work is to make strategic geopolitical forecasts, and Peter especially is known for his bold forecasts, so one would expect the global disruption caused by COVID-19 to throw a wrench in most of those predictions. The answer seems to be "sort of" and "not really." I'm reading this in 2023 which allows for a bit of hindsight and it would seem the COVID pandemic has compressed the timeline of the global transition from Bretton Woods to our eventual state of dis-unitedness. Peter's predictions went viral toward the end of 2022 I think because what he's been claiming, at least somewhat publicly since writing The Accidental Superpower (2014), has started to come into focus. The Baby Boomer retirements, the demographic inversions and in some cases implosions of various countries such as Russia, China, Japan, Korea, and others, and the Russia/Ukraine war are all examples of events that were forecasted but not this quickly.